By Matthew Vadum

As interest in the alleged warming of the planet wanes, the global warming inquisition is hoping to make an example of a heretical reporter whose only sin is healthy skepticism.

The enviro-Left is busy attempting to subject London-based Paul Ingrassia, an American journalist brought in by Reuters to beef up its worldwide news operation, to a digital auto-da-fe for insisting that the 2,800 journalists at the news agency at least try to provide fair and balanced accounts of the events of the day.

Ingrassia, by the way, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Gerald Loeb Award in 1993 for his news coverage of management turmoil at General Motors.

This newfound interest in objectivity at Reuters, where the word militant is still preferred over terrorist, appears to mean the agency is running fewer stories about climate change.

That’s fewer, not none. Reuters still diligently covers climate-related issues.

But that’s not good enough for those who embrace the increasingly shaky theory of anthropogenic global warming with religious zeal.

“It is just not responsible in our opinion to be cutting back on an issue that is having such a profound impact on every sector of the economy,” emoted Mindy Lubber, who runs the Ceres sustainable business network, which represents companies and investors worth more than $11 trillion in assets. “This is a financial risk that needs to be looked at and addressed.”

ThinkProgress, a hard-left blog run by John Podesta’s Center for American Progress Action Fund, referred to Ingrassia in a headline as “Openly Hostile to Climate Coverage.”

As Steven Hayward writes at Powerline, a slew of media outlets “are all on the chase, proving 1) the dependence of the climate campaign on a media monopoly, and 2) that the environmental version of the Brezhnev Doctrine lives - what’s there is theirs, and don’t dare change your news coverage.”

The mainstream media freakout began when a disgruntled former Reuters reporter who had covered the global warming beat threw an online temper tantrum after leaving the company. Singapore-based David Fogarty blogged about the editorial direction Reuters took after it hired journalism industry heavyweight Ingrassia, an experienced business reporter and editor, in 2011 to overhaul the company’s approach to news gathering.

Fogarty said he met Ingrassia at a work-related event in 2012 at which the veteran journalist allegedly acknowledged being a climate change skeptic. “Not a rabid skeptic, just someone who wanted to see more evidence mankind was changing the global climate,” Fogarty wrote.

“From very early in 2012, I was repeatedly told that climate and environment stories were no longer a top priority for Reuters and I was asked to look at other areas. Being stubborn, and passionate about my climate change beat, I largely ignored the directive.

“By mid-October, I was informed that climate change just wasn’t a big story for the present, but that it would be if there was a significant shift in global policy, such as the US introducing an emissions cap-and-trade system.”

Fogarty left the company in December, two months after his climate beat was excised. Although two full-time environment beat reporters now cover the subject area for Reuters, Fogarty resorted to conspiracy theorizing.

He claimed there is a growing “climate of fear” within Reuters that makes reporters reluctant to write about climate change.

Smelling blood, the George Soros-funded slander shop Media Matters for America promptly hopped on the anti-Ingrassia bandwagon, hastily beatifying Fogarty by calling him a “whistleblower” in a headline.

MMfA claimed that “Reuters’ coverage of climate change declined by nearly 50 percent under the regime of the current managing editor, lending credence to a former reporter’s claim that a ‘climate of fear’ has gripped the agency.”

But the facts suggest what happened was more akin to an outbreak of journalistic rigor, something disgraced ex-journalist David Brock’s cherry-picking character assassins at Media Matters would have difficulty recognizing.

The so-called study by the Democratic Party’s leading public relations agency examined how many climate change or global warming stories Reuters ran in two distinct periods. The first period was Oct. 19, 2010 to April 19, 2011, before Ingrassia worked at Reuters, and April 19, 2012 to Oct. 19, 2012, after he joined the company.

In the latter period “Reuters filed 48 percent fewer articles on climate change under the new regime, despite the fact that the latter period featured the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, a continuing fight over the European Union’s proposal to impose a carbon tax on international flights, record heat in the U.S. and other noteworthy developments,” according to Media Matters.

Of course none of those events would be of much interest to ordinary news consumers. Only climate change zealots, hardcore leftists, and unusually adventurous investors would consider most of those events to be highly newsworthy.

What else was happening in the world from mid-April to mid-October of last year?

It turns out there were plenty of exigent, newsworthy events that Reuters might have considered to be more worthy of coverage than an old, scientifically dubious doom-and-gloom theory embraced by an affective former U.S. vice president but cared about by few people outside of the green movement.

As the U.S. economy sputtered along and the national debt continued to balloon, there was an unusually nasty, bruising presidential election cycle that happened to be the most expensive and media-saturated in history. Terrorists attacked a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans including a sitting U.S. ambassador, whom they may have sexually tortured. Before the Obama administration eventually admitted that the incident in Libya was a coordinated Islamic terrorist attack, it blamed an obscure anti-Islam filmmaker for the sacking of the mission and made him a real-life political prisoner. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionally questionable Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

Facebook’s hyped-to-the-nth-degree public stock offering floundered. France elected dogmatic socialist Francois Hollande who promptly launched a new reign of terror against that nation’s long-suffering taxpayers leading prominent citizens like actor Gerard Depardieu to flee.

The Middle East and North Africa continued to be rocked by fallout from the so-called Arab Spring. The Eurozone crisis, festering since 2009, continued to bring misery to those living in or investing in countries bound by the Maastricht Treaty. London hosted the summer Olympics. A psychopathic dictator who succeeded his father, another psychopathic dictator, made great strides in solidifying his reign in reportedly nuclear North Korea. Gay marriage became legal in several countries.

In short, there was no shortage of interesting, important things to write about.

And naturally, as the scientific case for global warming continues to fall apart the likelihood of the formation of huge markets for trading carbon also declines commensurately. This means the possibility of high-dollar carbon trading will get less media attention.

Strangely, even the ever-watchful guardians of liberal journalism at the venerable Columbia Journalism Review dismiss the green-generated hype. CJR writer Alexis Sobel Fitts volunteers that most U.S. newsrooms have scaled back their climate change coverage since 2010:

In 2011, Environment & Energy Publishing, which produces Greenwire, ClimateWire, and four other news services, estimated they reduced climate coverage by about 13 percent. According to an assessment published by The Daily Climate, The New York Times cut its global warming article count by 15 percent, and the Guardian slashed coverage by 21 percent that same year. The Times, it should also be recalled, actually closed its news department assigned to cover environmental issues in January of 2013.

Fitts adds parenthetically that “Reuters, too, dropped its climate coverage by 27 percent in 2011, before Ingrassia came aboard.”

Fitts writes that several unidentified Reuters reporters spoke to her on background about a change in the news agency’s editorial stance. Since Ingrassia came aboard “they’ve felt pressure from management to add ‘balance’ to climate change stories by including the views of global-warming skeptics.”

“I’m really glad someone outside the company is looking into this,” she quoted one staffer saying. “I think this is the most worrying thing any of us have seen here.”

How dare Reuters strive to tell more than one side of the story.

Meanwhile, it is worth pointing out that the warming trend ended 15 years ago and since then global temperatures have held steady, if not decreased, while carbon dioxide emissions worldwide have skyrocketed.

“The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750,” the Economist reported in the spring.

The attacks on Ingrassia come as fresh evidence of panic emanates from the environmentalist Left. Activists seem to be realizing that they are losing the battle over this speculative phenomenon known as anthropogenic global warming.

To boost their sagging fortunes, desperate environmentalists are making particularly outrageous claims.

A new “metastudy” spoon-fed to incurious media outlets purports to show a clear link between rising temperatures and violence, especially on the African continent.

President Obama declared war on the coal industry and its workers a few weeks ago. Ignoring the science, the Alarmist-in-Chief declared that climate change was having “profound impacts” on the planet and must be dealt with.

Obama called for America to take the lead in a “coordinated assault” on the perceived problem and snarled, “We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-earth society.” (Icecap: Unless of course it is held at a golf course country club)

The Obama administration is also attempting to stifle climate change skeptics who work for the federal government.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told Interior Department staffers this week that fighting climate change is a “privilege” and a “moral imperative.”

“I hope there are no climate change deniers in the Department of Interior,” she said. Labeling climate change skeptics “deniers” is a crude but oft-used smear used by global warming true believers to blacken the names of their adversaries by associating them with anti-Semitic fanatics who deny the Holocaust happened during World War Two.

Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute opined that “[s]uch moralizing would be funny were it not for the chilling effect it is bound to have in an agency already mired in group think.”

The British-born Jewell, who was packaged throughout her confirmation process earlier this year as a reasonable environmental activist, started her career as an oil industry engineer. Before taking up her post in Obama’s cabinet, she was CEO of Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI).

Under Ingrassia’s able leadership Reuters may even cover the Jewell story.

Climate change heretics at the Interior Department and elsewhere in the U.S. government would be well advised to hold their tongues - or lose their jobs.

Read more. 

Belmont Club

Wikipedia shows that the curious term used by Mike Hulme, who argues Global Warming can only be met by something called “post-normal” science has a history of use in the environmental movement since the late 1980s and early 90s. I have interspersed the Wikipedia entry describing the term with my own commentary.

Post-Normal Science is a concept developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, attempting to characterise a methodology of inquiry that is appropriate for contemporary conditions. The typical case is when “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.” In such circumstances, we have an inversion of the traditional distinction between hard, objective scientific facts, and soft subjective values. Now we have value-driven policy decisions that are ‘hard’ in various ways, for which the scientific inputs are irremediably ‘soft’.

How are the values that drive these policy decisions derived? From whence do they come? And if their provenance does not derive from scientific fact, who chooses the appropriate values which should drive policy?

We can understand ‘Post-Normal Science’ by means of a diagram, where the axes are ‘systems uncertainties’ and ‘decision stakes’. When both are low, we have ‘applied science’, the routine puzzle-solving like the ‘normal science’ described by Thomas Samuel Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When either is medium, we have ‘professional consultancy’ for which the examples are the surgeon or the senior engineer. Although their work is based on science, they must always cope with uncertainties, and their mistakes can be costly or lethal. It had once been believed that environmental and general policy problems could be managed at this level, but the great issues of global warming and diverse forms of pollution show that framing and implementing policies must frequently be done before all the facts are in. Thus many problems occur in the high-stakes, high-uncertainty region of the diagram, a condition referred to as ‘post-normal.’

But wait. Weren’t we told that Global Warming was established scientific fact? That the world’s experts agreed on its existence? If so how can Global Warming be in the “high-stakes, high-uncertainty region” where post-normal and not normal science rules? In this special Twilight Zone where all the rules are suspended? The only way it can inhabit this region is if there is a high degree of uncertainty associated with it; in other words if “Global Warming” were only a theory and very iffy one at that. Wikipedia continues.

This is why there must be an ‘extended peer community’ consisting of all those affected by an issue who are prepared to enter into dialogue on it. They bring their ‘extended facts’, that will include local knowledge and materials not originally intended for publication such as leaked official information. There is a political case for this extension of the franchise of science; but Funtowicz and Ravetz also argue that this extension is necessary for assuring the quality of the process and of the product. In recent years the principles and practices of Post-Normal Science have been widely adopted under the title ‘participation’.

What is is this “extended peer community” and what is an “extended fact”? Is it extended like saltwater taffy or extended as in hamburger helper? Like the “values” which drive policy, who chooses these extended peers? What are their qualifications? Can anybody be a peer? All in all, the notion of “post-normal science” seems like a complete contradiction in terms or a perversion of the standard definition of science as commonly understood. It appears to be an elaborate and dishonest attempt to pass off the preferences of a single group as some kind of pseudo-science.

There’s a much simpler term for this dishonest phrase: politics. Post-normal science is nothing but a cheap and lying term for a political diktat; for the rule of the self-appointed over everyone else. Whatever truth “Global Warming” may contain it has surely been damaged by its association with this disreputable and vile concept which brazenly casts aside the need for any factual basis and declares in the most unambiguous terms that whatever values it chooses to promote constitutes a truth unimpeachable by reality and a set of values that none dare challenge. Until “post-normal science” is repudiated as a method of proving “global warming” then both must share the same reputation.

To which commenter Betsybounds noted:

This is what we’re in for if we don’t manage to stop it. I fear for the future, truly I do.

By Jay Lehr

In 1968, when I was serving as the head of a groundwater professional society, it became obvious to some of my colleagues and me that the United States did not have any serious focus on potential problems with its air quality, drinking water quality, surface water quality, waste disposal problems, and contamination that could occur from mining and agriculture. I held the nation’s first Ph.D. in groundwater hydrology, which gave me unparalleled insight into many of these potential problems.

We spoke before dozens of congressional committees, calling attention to mounting environmental pollution problems. We called for the establishment of a federal Environmental Protection Agency, and in 1971 we succeeded. I was appointed to a variety of the new agency’s advisory councils, and over the next 10 years we helped write a variety of legislative bills to make up a true safety net for our environment. These included, among others, the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act); the Safe Drinking Water Act; the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act; the Clean Air Act; the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act; and the Comprehensive Environmental Reclamation, Compensation, and Liability Act.

All of these laws worked extremely well in protecting the environment and our citizens’ health, with the exception of the Superfund Law, which proved to be far too overreaching.

Agenda-Driven Turning Point

A turning point occurred roughly a decade after the creation of EPA. Activist groups realized the agency could be used to alter our government by coming down heavily on all human activities regardless of their impact on the environment. From approximately 1981 onward, EPA rules and regulations became less about science-based environmental protection and more about advancing extraneous ideological agendas.

States Ready

It is my very strong belief that most EPA jurisdiction and functions can and should be replaced by a committee of the whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. Each of the individual states have its own environmental protection department, and these are much better at assessing and crafting solutions to local and regional environmental issues than the federal EPA. At the national level, a committee of the whole would do a much better job directing environmental stewardship than the money-hungry and power-hungry federal EPA.

Back in 1971, a federal EPA was necessary because the states did not have environmental protection departments. Now, however, with state environmental departments already providing on-the-ground environmental protection throughout the 50 states, EPA has morphed into an overpowering entity that arrogantly dictates to the 50 states while doing everything possible to protect its power and regulatory turf.

The 50 state agencies are ready to assume full management of our environmental issues. The state agencies already do so, with many states enacting and enforcing environmental rules more stringent than those crafted by EPA. Only the EPA research laboratories should be left in place to answer scientific questions, no longer under the heavy hand of Washington politics.

Workable Phase-Out Plan

We could eliminate 80 percent of EPA’s bloated $8 billion budget and return the money to the people. The remaining 20 percent could be used to fund EPA’s research labs and pull together a committee of the 50 state environmental protection departments to take over EPA’s other responsibilities.

A relatively small administrative structure is all that is necessary to enable the states to work together. The states would have the incentive and the means to act as environmental stewards without the power to impose scientifically unjustified, economically punitive restrictions on a national basis.

We could phase out EPA in five years. It would take one year to prepare the new structure and then four years to phase out the various EPA bureaucracy and programs. As each EPA program is phased out, the committee of the whole would assume the phased-out oversight and responsibilities.

Committee of the Whole Responsibilities

The committee of the whole would quickly determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were crafted under EPA discretion. The committee would then reassess discretionary regulations to ensure wise ones are retained and unwise strictures are revised or repealed. A good procedure for reviewing EPA regulations would require a two-thirds vote of the committee of the whole to revise or repeal an existing EPA regulation.

Environmental stewardship would continue unabated, but without the severe negative consequences resulting from EPA arrogance and overreach.

Until and unless the committee of the whole acts upon an existing regulation, each regulation will remain in force. Therefore, all existing environmental rules and regulations are presumed wise and valid unless the states determine otherwise.

When one considers the initial motivation for creating a federal EPA, a committee of the whole 50 states makes perfect sense as a forward-looking means of ensuring wise and appropriate environmental stewardship. The states are in the best position to assess and address environmental concerns within their respective borders, and a committee of the whole can effectively address environmental issues that are regional or national in nature.

The easy path is the path of least resistance. The easy path is to continue funding and granting increasing power to an out-of-control federal EPA. A wiser path is to recognize that the individual states are ready and willing to provide more commonsense environmental protection.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (lehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.